Induction and secretion of acid phosphatases (APases) is considered to be an important strategy for improving plant growth under conditions of low inorganic phosphate (Pi). Purple acid phosphatases (PAPs), are an important class of plant APases that could be secreted into the rhizosphere to utilize organic phosphorus (Po) for plant growth and development. To date, only a few members of the PAP ...

Experimental evolution is a powerful approach to unravel how selective forces shape microbial genotypes and phenotypes. To this date, the available examples focus on the adaptation to conditions specific to the laboratory. The lactic acid bacterium Lactococcus lactis naturally occurs on plants and in dairy environments, and it is proposed that dairy strains originate from the plant niche. Here ...

Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus L.) has a high potential for forage production inboth rangelands and cultivated rainfed areas of Iran. It is well adapted to semi-arid areas ofwest and north of country where annual rainfall is 250–350 mm. To study the seed and DryMatter (DM) yield and agronomic traits, six genotypes of Lathyrus sativus L. and twogenotypes of Lathyrus inconspicuous L. were provided b...

Nitrogen is essential for plant survival and growth. Excessive application of nitrogenous fertilizer has generated serious environment pollution and increased production cost in agriculture. To deal with this problem, tremendous efforts have been invested worldwide to increase the nitrogen use ability of crops. However, only limited success has been achieved to date. Here we report that NLP7 (N...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small regulatory RNAs, which repress gene expression at the posttranscriptional levels through binding to target mRNAs for directly cleaving mRNAs or inhibiting protein translation. Mature miRNAs are produced from miRNA genes by multiple biological processes, in which several important enzymes are involved in. To date, several hundreds of miRNAs have been ident...

The methanol extracts of 168 plant species from 68 families were evaluated for their inhibitory activity against lettuce seedling elongation. Among the plant species tested, 12 species had EC50 values for radicle growth inhibition ranging from 0.01 to 5.00 mg fresh weight equivalent mL. Enterolobium contortisiliquum, a traditionally used herbal medicine, exhibited the strongest inhibitory activ...